CHAPTER 6
Recognizing the Other
The Armenian Genocide in Scandinavian literature
Soon the world was a gaping wound,
The two became thousands. Day became year.
But you never forget them—the first two,
who were borne ashore at Galata Bridge.1
What does it take to recognize another life? Under what circumstances is it possible to recognize it as valuable, important, and grievable? Is it only when we are able to apprehend a life that it matters to us if it is lost; is it only then that we can act to save or protect it?
Judith Butler argues in her book Frames of war. When is life grievable? (2009) that we need to recognize life as precarious, conditional, and that this requires support in social relations and institutions.2 But we must also try to see what determines and defines what kind of life is recognized, because this recognition is not equally distributed. Butler discusses the example of the photographs of the torture carried out in the Abu Ghraib prison, and she asks why war tends to make some lives grievable and others ungrievable. She focuses especially on the media framing: how the photos are shown, how they are named and described, when they are shown. These framings all ‘work together to produce an interpretative matrix for what is seen.’3 In other words, Butler wants to discuss the ways in which suffering is presented to us, and how this presentation affects our responsiveness. In particular, she wants to understand ‘how the frames that allocate the recognizability of certain figures of the human are themselves linked with broader norms that determine what will and will not be a grievable life’.4
In this chapter, I take the perspectives presented by Butler on the grievability of images and texts, and pose the question of what function the act of criticizing war has. Can the criticism be an attempt to recognize all lives as grievable, or to recognize the lives that hitherto have been denied? As Butler writes, ‘What would it take not only to apprehend the precarious character of lives lost in war, but to have that apprehension coincide with an ethical and political opposition to the losses war entails? … How is affect produced by this structure of the frame?’5 How do we avoid human catastrophes becoming abstractions for us? And how do we avoid the paralysing effect of habit when the world is ‘a gaping wound’, ‘two became thousands’, and in suffering ‘day became year’?
These questions are examined here in relation to the Scandinavian commitment for the Armenian people during the mass exterminations by the Turkish army in the 1910s. The Armenian Genocide took place during the First World War, and the simultaneity of the two events poses an interesting problem for the question of Swedish engagement and the possibility of communicating grievable life in the shocking torrent of death and suffering. From a European perspective, the outskirts of Europe were hit by another tragedy, which was partly over-shadowed by an already shattered everyday life. However, it is not the public engagement as such that will be explored, but rather a specific medium, namely fiction.
The aim of this chapter is to explore how the Danish teacher and writer Inga Nalbandiàn tried to get the Scandinavians to commit to the Armenian cause. Through a reading of her three novels published as Den store Jammer (‘The Great Lamentation’) (1917–18), I will show how fiction can create or fail to create compassion for unknown lives, and thus, in Butler’s words, to make those lives grievable. To do so, a close text analysis is combined with an examination of the publishing context and the reception of the books— ultimately the question touches on the significance of literature in the making of public opinion.
The Armenian Genocide and the Scandinavian public opinion
Armenia has a long history of conflicts and has repeatedly been subjected to the great powers’ attempts to wrest control and influence.6 In the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the country belonged to the Ottoman Empire, but the eastern part was under Persian influence. Soon another great power, Russia, became interested in Caucasus for political and economic reasons. At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of European ideas and goods, tensions increased between the Muslim ruling class and an Armenian middle class with considerable influence on commerce and banking. Armenians and other Christian minorities had strong positions in urban areas, and they demanded the same civil rights as Muslims had. As in Europe, national movements fighting for independence were growing stronger. The Turkish–Russian War of 1877–8 brought an intensification of their demands, but the war only led to Russia’s increased influence over the country’s northern regions. In the 1880s, new revolutionary political parties were formed, clashes took place, and eventually the authorities’ response was direct attacks and massacres of Armenian villages. About 300,000 Armenians were killed in 1895–6. After several relatively quiet years, the turbulence increased around 1910. The Sultan was removed in a bloodless coup d’état and a group of reform-oriented and well-educated officers, the so-called Young Turks, took over. Their goal was to create a modern nation founded on an ethnic and authoritarian nationalism. But Russia stood in the way of their dream of Pan-Turkism, and Armenia constituted a real threat as the region bordering on Russia. Ottoman society became militarized, and opposition was met with violence and terror.
In early November 1914, Turkey joined Germany in the First World War. At the same time, what later came to be known as the Great Genocide began—an attempt at the systematic extermination of an entire people.7 Government employees were fired, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed and sent to labour battalions, and officers were imprisoned. At the end of March 1915, deportations began, first of men, then of women and children. Many were sent southwards, toward the Syrian Desert, and most of them died on the way or were killed upon arrival. Nearly half of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was killed, with estimates ranging from at least 800,000 up to 1 million people.8 Some managed to escape to Russia, others were forced to convert to Islam, and a few survivors were found in the Syrian Desert after the war.9
Both European and American media reported on the genocide. Strong condemnations were directed against the Turks; already in May 1915 the Entente Powers threatened the Ottoman government that it would be held personally accountable if the crimes against humanity continued. However, in the subsequent peace negotiations in 1920, no UN member state wished to accept the role as mandate power over Armenia.10
The Scandinavian countries were not unaware of what was happening. Already in the 1880s, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian missionaries stationed in Armenia had reported on the killings, and when the great deportations began, several missionaries and aid workers still remained in the country. Many of them testified to the most brutal acts of violence against the Armenian people.11 The Scandinavian foreign ministries received reports from diplomats, and the Danish envoy Carl Ellis Wandel in particular seems to have understood with perfect clarity what was going on. Wandel interpreted the deportations as an openly cruel, opportunistic, political and economic project, fuelled by a nationalist ideology.12 The Swedish ambassador in Constantinople, P. G. A. C. Anckarsvärd, also reported in detail on Turkey’s increasingly violent actions and described it as ‘the Extermination of the Armenian nation’.13
The Swedish policy on Armenia and the commitment to the Armenian cause have been characterized as strongly linked to the peace movement against the First World War, which of course was redoubled during the war years and then weakened at the end of the war.14 In Stockholm, a protest meeting in support of the Armenians was held in the autumn of 1917, with the author Marika Stiernstedt and the Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting as speakers. Stiernstedt’s speech was published afterwards, and she went on a lecture tour in the provinces.15 The Swedish press reported on the events in Armenia, but the reports were, not surprisingly, over-shadowed by the news from the World War.16 Information and knowledge about the situation in Armenia thus existed in Scandinavia, as did some commitment and aid work. However, it did not lead to much concrete action.
To apprehend the lives of others
Inga Nalbandiàn (née Collin, 1879–1929) was a teacher, journalist, and writer, married to the Armenian Paul Mardiros Nalbandiàn. They met in Switzerland and in 1909 they settled in Constantinople when Mardiros Nalbandiàn received an appointment as lecturer at the Armenian National High School. The situation became more and more precarious as the deportations intensified, and in the summer of 1916 they sent their two children back to Denmark. Paul Mardiros Nalbandiàn died shortly afterwards, and Inga Nalbandiàn returned to Denmark that same autumn. Once in Denmark, she started writing her books about Armenia: Den Store Jammer, De Hjemsøgte and Den Hvide Mark (‘The Great Lamentation’, ‘The Haunted’, and ‘The White Field’) (1917–18). The books comprise seemingly independent stories linked by their setting, as they take place at the same hospital, in the same village, or the same city. Eventually, however, the reader discovers that the stories relate to one another, characters return, kinship is revealed, and destinies are intertwined. The composition alternates between narration, dialogue, diary notes, and letters.
Some themes in the novels recur. The first touches upon the atrocities committed by the Turks, and the innocent victims’ suffering. A second theme depicts the national character of the Armenians and the Armenian nation, and a third history and politics. All these discourses are linked to the epideictic rhetorical genre, as they reinforce certain values and norms and thus indirectly renounce others.17 A fourth theme belongs to the judicial genre since it sharply criticizes Turkey’s (and Europe’s) actions. In addition to these themes, others emerge when the novels are considered as a whole. Among other things, women’s vulnerability appears to be an important theme, as it turns out that all the main female characters die. The small group of Armenians who in the very last chapter are headed for what at least looks like freedom consist of men and boys only.
The variation in narrative perspective is a key factor when discussing literature as addressed to an implied reader. But a text’s ability to induce action in others depends on the reader as much as on the text itself. A text can only provide the prerequisites for action; for that action to become reality, it takes a meeting with a reader who is willing to listen, reconsider, and act upon it.18 A text calls upon its readers in different ways, but of course it is not only text-internal factors that matter, but also material contexts. Butler discusses related issues as she emphasizes how frames ‘seek to contain, convey, and determine what is seen’.19 Norms and frames restrict the visions and attention of the one reading, and leave the reader to a greater or lesser extent ethically responsive in apprehending life as precarious and grievable.20
What are the frames that capture Nalbandiàn’s novels? Do they facilitate or prevent the recognition of Armenian life and suffering? The author’s good intentions do not necessarily mean that the frames have the desired effect. Butler emphasizes that such frames are politically saturated operations of power.21 In the present context, the frames include the literary composition itself, the author’s status, and the whole media context—its publication, translation, and reception.
Perspectives on a boy
The choice of narrative perspective is a crucial frame when it comes to the reader’s perception of events and characters. Nalbandiàn alternates between first and third person narrative and between points of view in the different stories. While the many diary entries and letters give the reader the possibility to empathize and identify with the characters, this is counteracted by the novella structure, the reverse chronology, and the many disparate human destinies. For a Scandinavian reader, such a trivial thing as the many Armenian names can obstruct and create distance (and sometimes, to make it even more complicated, when a name reappears, it belongs to a different person than the first time). The ambivalent function of shifting perspectives is clearly seen in the story about the boy Karnig. He is one of the main characters in the work, since he returns in all three parts. He may not be one of the characters who take up the most space, but he happens to be related to several other characters, and therefore comes to be something of a focal point in the narrative web. Karnig is a young man who is midway between childhood and adulthood. The reader meets him for the first time in the Armenian hospital where he works. Then he is deported, but the reader remains unaware of what happens to him. Much later, we are told that he managed to escape death by hiding in a cave with some other refugees. At the end of the third book, he is saved from starvation and joins some other boys on their escape over the Russian border.
In the very short story ‘Revenge’, Karnig is talking to the younger boy Humajàk, telling him about the Armenian volunteers who fight in the Russian Eastern Army against the Turks. He is described entirely from the younger boy’s hero-worshipping perspective. We get glimpses of his previous life, but the focus is on his ‘proud and silent despair’ at being confined to the hospital as a nurse, and on his longing for the ‘brothers at the Russian Front’.22
Next time, Karnig is also depicted from an external perspective, this time through the gaze of the chief of the hospital, Garekin Effendi. Night has fallen, and Karnig stares at the sky where bombers are circling. The dialogue between them reveals that Karnig fought in the First Balkan War, on the Turkish side, and that he is guilt-ridden over the unspeakable actions there. Karnig appears as a frightened animal, uncertain, anxious, and wild-eyed.
After the deportation of the children from the hospital, the reader does not meet Karnig again until the very last story in the second book (‘The Dripstone Cave’). This is a story about a group of starving and dying people who have sought shelter from their pursuers in a cave. Karnig feels responsible for the others, but the hunger and exhaustion are overwhelming: ‘The fatigue makes him see flashing lights. The bayonet wound in his shoulder hurts. Sleep—Sleep!’23 Here, for the first time, the narrative is told from Karnig’s point of view, and the reader gets to meet his inner struggle. Equally important for the reader’s view of Karnig is his encounter with the starving woman who finds her way to the cave with a child. She gets a few grains to chew on, and she tells him her story while Karnig holds the child in his arms. The roles become reversed here and Karnig is the adult, and the woman is a child. The next morning, both the woman and her son are dead, and the story ends with Karnig’s words: ‘Stepan … Come and help me carry them out.’24 These lines are a distillation of what war forces people to endure. The scene brings the reader closer to Karnig as everything is seen from Karnig’s point of view. The fact that not everything has to be said to be understood strengthens the sense of presence. His sorrow becomes the sorrow of the reader.
In one of the last stories in the third book (‘When Karnig came’), Karnig is found lying on a river beach by another boy. The boy takes him to a hut where he and some others are planning an escape. The dialogue between the two dominates the narrative, but the main intrigue is really something else. When the boy goes to fetch bread, he sees, ‘as usual’, corpses floating down the river.25 But this time he recognizes one of them. It is Araksi, a girl who lived with her grandmother in the village. The reader has met her in several of the previous stories. She was an orphan, but had a brother who left home several years ago, and she still hoped to see him again. His name is Karnig. In this way, the story depicts a meeting that never happens, a meeting that comes too late, and creates an imagined gap in the narrative, emblematic of the kind of postponed reunions and lack of reunions that war causes.
How, then, does this frame, consisting of shifts and changes in narration and points of view, affect the reader’s responsiveness? The different and sometimes contradictory images of the young man emphasize human’s complex nature. He is the young, brave hero fighting for his country; he is the abused child forced to grow up all too fast; he is the chosen one; he is the silent soldier with dark secrets. The distant relationship between the reader and Karnig, which slowly develops into something else, mirrors the relationship between Scandinavian readers and the Armenians. It was not until 1917 that Scandinavian popular support for Armenia made heard of itself, through books, pamphlets, and manifestations— the protest meeting in Stockholm mentioned earlier was held that autumn. The composition and overall structure of Nalbandiàn’s books—the many different destinies that the reader encounters and quickly leaves behind for yet more others—thus reflect the difficulty in apprehending the suffering of lives in another part of the world, and to see them as subjects, as individuals. In the beginning, Karnig is just one of many to be pitied, much like the characters that quickly pass by in a newspaper article. It is only as the reader continues reading that relationships appear and characters transform from abstractions into real human fates. The geographical and cultural distance from Armenian suffering can thus in time be overcome by a committed reading of the novels. The rapid and fluid narrative that creates distance is renegotiated over time, and suddenly the narrative becomes more consistent and familiar. Perhaps this is how literature, in Butler’s words, can make us recognize the divergent lives of others as precarious and grievable. What is familiar is also grievable. In other words, the reading of Nalbandiàn’s novels requires a perseverance much like that required for political commitment. In that way, the frame of narrative perspective can both approach and distance the Scandinavian reader in relation to Armenian lives.
To tell the truth – witness literature and fiction
There are several stories in the books that function the same way as Karnig’s, but sometimes with a reversed chronology. This is seen, for example, when Dr Delacombe tells Garekin Effendi what happened when the young, promising doctor Haïk Hovsephian was abducted, put in prison, and eventually shot. The prelude to the abduction is related in the second book, which takes place in spring 1915. Most of the stories in this book are set in the city of Pera and the characters are urban and middle class. The abduction has already been described by Dr Delacombe in a letter in the first book: ‘they are all gone, friends and colleagues, politicians, members of the National Assembly, editors, professors, all the “intellectuals”: practically all have been deported or hanged or at best been shot in the dark deserts of Asia Minor; the patriarchate is closed, the newspapers withdrawn—’26
The instructive tone of this and similar passages must be attributed to the genre as such. This literature has a message; it is literature with a political purpose. In such genres, the imminent risk is that the political dimension overshadows the aesthetic, or, if you will, telling dominates over showing.27 This way of writing can also be linked to the text’s claims to truth, or at least to authenticity. The parallel to witness literature is illustrative. The historian Peter Englund has written about the difficulties of this genre; about the conflict between the literary and the testimony, between form and function. He calls witness literature a ‘mongrel form of literature’, for
in spite of appearances, the genre is a difficult one, both in form and function. There are more failures than triumphs. The problem is that instead of a union of the best of two distinct literary worlds, we often get a union of the worst. The outcome functions neither as a source nor as literature. The requirements of veracity distort the literary form, while the literary form distorts the testimony. Auden wrote that every attempt to create something that could be at once beautiful and functional was doomed to fail, and this may even apply to witness literature.28
At the same time, the fragmented and disorganized is an effective counterweight to the tendentious and one-sided. Englund comments on the deformation that inevitably occurs when we make a narrative of the past: ‘We gain, of course, coherence, totality, and flow but at the risk of forcing narrative and teleological unity on to something that in reality is diverse, confused, and contradictory. The very form of narrative tempts us to tidy things up.’29 In his discussion of three testimonies from the First World War he points to the lack of concision and composition—it is not a linear story—as an indirect, ‘truer’ form. The same could be said of Nalbandiàn’s work. Thus, fragmented and disordered, the aesthetic in itself might be a way of approaching the Armenian experience. It is a frame that, perhaps paradoxically, does not try to define or delimit, but rather to unclose; that makes double and partially incompatible demands on the reader, for it is for the reader to arrange and organize events and human fates, or to accept chaos and incoherence.
There are great similarities between the testimonies of Nalbandiàn’s fictional characters and the testimonies of violence, abuse, and persecution in actual Scandinavian reports. The Swedish author Marika Stiernstedt quoted directly from the Bryce Report, which comprised of hundreds of documents on the deportations and described executions, rape, and drowning. The descriptions are often straightforward and brutal. Sexualized violence against women is mentioned, explicitly but briefly: ‘The girls were almost without exception violated by the soldiers or their henchmen’; a woman has ‘been left in the hands of ten officers, to their delight—“to be their sport” ’.30
In comparison, the young boy Humajàk’s account of the deportation of his family is given the same outer frame by Nalbandiàn, but the perspective is a child’s and the descriptions more indirect:
And so all the women were gathered in ox-wagons and taken to boats, which lay down by the river. And they screamed and wept. But the young and those who the Turks liked were put aside. And they were sold, all of them, and many of the children too. And the children, who had their mother sold to others, they were running around crying—31
It is as if the boy, with his personal involvement in the event, is unable to describe his family in an all too brutal or frank language. It is often said that direct and crude language arouses repugnance and disgust, but what if it is the other way around? Perhaps such language coarsens in a way that makes it harder to apprehend the victims as human beings? Are they deprived of their humanity and dignity in this way? Butler discusses the pornographic gaze fixed on pictures of torture and scenes of violence—an objectifying and dehumanizing gaze, which, in Butler’s words, prevents us from becoming ethically responsive and instead makes the lives depicted inhumane and ultimately ungrievable.32 Why should not verbal language function in a similar way? It is a parallel sign system, symbolic instead of iconic. If so, then Nalbandiàn’s narrative style can be said to be an attempt to move away from the pornographic style of direct, crude, and matter-of-fact language use to one of greater tenderness and fluidity.
Furthermore, the power of the fictive testimony lies in its coherence—that the reader gets a brief but seemingly whole story, instead of disjointed fragments. Humajàk’s story does not end when he is separated from his mother, but continues there and then, and again later as a story within the larger narrative. This extension in time allows the reader to establish a relationship with him, and he thereby becomes someone the reader in one way or another has to relate to.
Contexts – the writer’s ethos, publication, and reception
Butler emphasizes that responsiveness is not ‘a merely subjective state, but a way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us.’33 Following this argument, it is not surprising that the Scandinavian commitment to the Armenian cause was not that strong, as events in Turkey had to compete with the media reports on the First World War. Nalbandiàn’s project can be seen as an attempt to break with certain frames. Or to use Butler’s words, ‘it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness.’34 But to succeed, Nalbandiàn had to reach out to a broad audience, which is not the easiest task for a relatively anonymous author. Her personal connection to the subject will certainly have helped. Regarded as fictive testimony, the deliberative appeal is also strengthened by her personal involvement. She herself commented on the relation between fact and fiction in the preface to her first book: ‘I must see with the eyes of others and feel with the hearts of others in order to depict the events, which are the most dreadful and unbelievable of all the irrevocable horrors caused by the world war. The events that have set the indelible mark of death on my own and my young children’s lives.’35
In a later text she confirmed that several of her characters were based on real-life people, and on her husband’s nieces and nephews who disappeared during the deportations. One of them was called Humajàk: ‘And if it is our own little Humajàk—him or one of the many wandering, homeless, half-naked children who in the tracks of the deportations’ train of death are picked up by merciful travellers now and then, searching for barleycorn in the dung of horses and mules…—that I do not know, and it does not matter.’36 The quotation is from an open letter addressed to the women of Scandinavia, published in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende in 1919. The exhortation is explicit: read my books as a testimony of what actually happened, read, react, and respond: ‘And now in the eleventh hour, let the Scandinavian Women’s Association help one another so that the light can again be lit deep in the dark eyes of the children’.37 In other words, the fictive contract between reader and novel does not entirely apply. It can be seen as an attempt to challenge the medium and break the traditional frame of literary narrative. As will be discussed further on, the books’ reception shows that they were, in fact, read and judged by somewhat different criteria than usual.
One frame that delimits and weakens the deliberative appeal is Nalbandiàn’s relatively weak ethos and status as a writer. She could not take publication for granted. Judging from the fragmentary correspondence preserved, she hoped to get her manuscript published by Gyldendal, one of Denmark’s largest and oldest publishing houses, with a good reputation. That is where she had made her début as a writer in 1905, with a collection of poems, Bølgesang. Digte om Drøm och Liv (‘Billow Song. Poems on Dream and Life’). Her next book, Børn (‘Children’, 1913) was a kind of handbook for mothers in essay form, or ‘studies in practical pedagogy’ as one of the reviewers put it. Moreover, she had, from her home in Constantinople, reported on the political and cultural situation in Turkey for the Danish newspaper Dagbladet. In the autumn of 1914, she tried to convince the author and editor Peter Nansen to accept two manuscripts: a book she called ‘Balkan—or short stories of war’, and another book about children. She did not get the answer she wished for and wrote disappointedly that Nansen had now beheaded her twice in the most amiable way.38 She tried again to invoke the letter of recommendation by the author and literary critic Wilhelm Østergaard, in which he emphasized the artistic qualities of her short stories.39 Østergaard worked at Gyldendal and edited, among other things, the Gyldendal Library series (1899–1916). In February 1915, having revised the short stories, she made a new attempt to attract Nansen’s interest, but without success. The short stories were not picked up by a publisher until 1918.40 However, her other manuscript was finally accepted in 1915, with the title Barndom. En Bog om Børn (‘Childhood. A book about children’).
Without further research it will be difficult to determine why Gyldendal did not publish her three Armenian books. Instead, they were published by the relatively newly established Aschehoug Dansk Forlag A/S, a branch of the Norwegian H. Aschehoug & Co. The Norwegian publisher had been running a general bookshop and a publishing house since 1872, and had been in Denmark since 1908. The publishing house grew rapidly during the first decades of the twentieth century.41 Nalbandiàn wrote in a late letter to Nansen that she did not even send her manuscript to Gyldendal at the time because Nansen was abroad. But considering the limited interest Nansen showed in her manuscript, other factors were probably involved. Nevertheless, Nansen’s opinions and judgement continued to matter to Nalbandiàn. Two weeks before the publication of Den Store Jammer, she wrote to Nansen to ask him if he would reread her preface to the book: ‘Is the language good? What is there to correct when it comes to language and content? Is something unclear? Something too political or too personal? Is there too little or is there too much?’42 Her letters to Nansen reveal that she was struggling with her identity as a writer, but also that she had literary and political ambitions. She wanted to be recognized as an artist, but just as important, she wanted her writings to reach a wide audience and spur them to action.
There is an interesting tension between her difficulties in getting her books published and the books’ subsequent reception and circulation. None other than Georg Brandes, Denmark’s leading literary critic, remarked on the first book in an article in Politiken.43 Now, Brandes was already involved in the Armenian question and was one of the founders of the aid organization Danske Armeniervenner (Danish Armenian Friends), and as early as 1900 he had written a long article on the atrocities Armenians had suffered in the 1890s. Brandes’s article in Politiken is no regular review of Nalbandiàn’s book, but rather an article that, prompted by the release of her book, seizes the opportunity to direct attention to the Armenian situation. But regardless, to be acknowledged by such an influential critic had significance. Brandes also wrote a foreword to one of the later editions, in which he praised the combination of artistry and politics: ‘It looks reality in the eye, depicts the events as they were and are, without parading feeling or indignation.’44 It is also worth noticing that by May, when Brandes’s article was printed, the book had already run to five editions, which gives an indication of the demand. Several translations were already underway, and the book was soon published in Swedish, French, and Dutch. Berlingske Tidende, one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, did a feature story on Nalbandiàn, remarking that the many editions were a sign of the public’s interest in the cause ‘and that it is treated in a way that makes it appeal’.45
Finally, to broaden the perspective, I will look at the Scandinavian reception of the books by examining some of the literary reviews in Swedish newspapers. Nalbandiàn’s first book was reviewed in several of the major Swedish newspapers. On Christmas Eve 1917, the Social Democrat Anna Lindhagen—also committed to the Armenian question—wrote a detailed review of the first two books in the conservative Svenska Dagbladet.46 The review is rather conventional. It largely consists of a plot summary, and the judgement is altogether positive. Lindhagen adopts what might be called a functionalist perspective on literature, and suggests that anyone who considers it a duty to find out what is happening in Armenia should read these books. But she also emphasizes what is characteristic about literature: it can teach us in a much more efficient way than the reports available, since it can give us insight into the hearts of the Armenian martyrs. The review’s aesthetic arguments are sketchy, but she praises the lack of sensation, and highlights the mildness of the stories.
Reading between the lines in Lindhagen’s review, we see a hope that readers’ compassion will be transformed into political action. The same idea is found in her review in the social-democratic women’s magazine Morgonbris, but there she focuses on actual events and on the importance of the outside world finding out what was going on.47 Something similar is seen in the unsigned review in the liberal Dagens Nyheter, albeit from a different perspective. While Lindhagen argues that the death toll is even greater than what is being said, this critic objects: ‘it may be doubted that the extermination of the Armenian race is so complete as Inga Nalbandiàn fears and thinks. But undoubtedly, this people’s history of suffering during the First World War marks one of its most horrible chapters. Unspeakable atrocities, a whole singular culture devastated; that is the content of this book written in tears.’48 Also in the long, largely positive review in the conservative Stockholms Dagblad, a large section is devoted partly to the background and reasons for the conflict, partly to political debate. Turkey’s attacks are not excused; however, the reviewer objects to Nalbandiàn’s way of portraying Germany’s role in the conflict. And as for the book’s intention, as understood by the reviewer, ‘to arouse the readers pity and interest for the unfortunate Armenian people … the author has succeeded admirably.’49 The most detailed literary judgement is found in the conservative Lunds Dagblad. Like the other critics, Vilhelm Buhre discusses the political situation and Nalbandiàn’s personal ties with Armenia, but he also emphasizes that this is a book of ‘high poetic value’: it is well composed, has a graceful style, and is narrated vividly but without excess.50
It becomes clear, having examined the reception of the books, that the critics’ judgements were based on somewhat different criteria than were usually applied to fiction. At times, critics confused literary or aesthetic value with subject matter. Elsewhere, aesthetics were suppressed, or a book was said to be worth reading despite its compositional shortcomings because of its important topic. The latter is evident in several of the critics’ detailed accounts of Armenian history and their discussion of the current political situation. The addressivity is all about enlightenment and compassion. Although the critics’ judgement is a frame that partly reduces a text’s aesthetics, it is not just a restricting frame, because at the same time they place the book in a wider context with political implications. The critics emphasize literature as part of a larger media system, attempting to influence and change the society it is a part of. The judgements on a book clearly point to the complicated relationship between aesthetics and politics, and the fact that the myth of the non-political or purely aesthetic text is definitely not valorized here. Instead, the reviewers’ various responses show that the frame of politics and the frame of aesthetics are inseparable and contingent. In this case, it is as if the political anticipates the aesthetic and influences its expression.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed how literature, together with the frames that determine its interpretation and circulation, can create ethical and political opposition to the losses of war. The challenge, according to Butler, is to make the lives of others human and grievable. But there are also frames that inhibit and delimit. The first frame discussed here is an enabling frame and has to do with narrative perspective. The reader’s possible identification with the Armenians is strengthened when characters are described from a first-person perspective. It is as if the reader, by adopting the same point of view, almost becomes one with the character in question. The second frame has to do with the composition and overall structure of the three books. On the one hand, the fragmentary structure forces the reader to a greater degree of co-creation; yet on the other, the reader risks losing interest if there are too many sketchy characters and disparate plots, especially since the text is not aesthetically very interesting. The third enabling frame is connected to genre, to the texts’ closeness to witness literature, and the claim to authenticity. Nalbandiàn’s texts are given a special charge by the fact that they were written by someone who ‘had been there’. This is evident in several reviews, where the books are characterized as a moving testimony. The fourth frame both opens and forecloses, and is also related to genre, particularly the texts’ informative and instructive features. It reveals a will on the author’s part to teach the ignorant Scandinavians. This frame alienates the text from the literary genre and brings it closer to the many pamphlets and reports on Armenia written at the time. The determination to provide knowledge creates credibility, but weakens the literary form. At the same time, knowledge of what is happening is the first step towards action. Concerning the fifth and final frame, the publishing context, there are several different factors that work in both directions. The fact that Nalbandiàn was not an established author is a disadvantage, as is the fact that a small, relatively unknown publishing house published the first two Swedish translations. Neither did the Swedish newspapers’ most important critics review her work. The enabling frames are the many editions and translations, and Georg Brandes’s positive judgement of her work.
The textual analysis reveals the author’s address to a relatively ignorant Scandinavian audience that through reading will be brought to knowledge, compassion, and commitment. However, the somewhat challenging composition requires a persevering reader. This fact, combined with the analysis of publishing context and reception, suggests that the books reached out on a relatively broad spectrum, but that they probably mainly attracted the attention of people already committed to the peace movement and human rights issues. Nalbandiàn’s books on Armenia were above all noticed by a Scandinavian movement that brought together war critics and pacifists—the likes of Georg Brandes, Anna Lindhagen, and Marika Stiernstedt.
Finally, Nalbandiàn’s books on Armenia can also have forward-looking function. At the end of the review in Morgonbris, Anna Lindhagen downplays her belief in what this type of literature is capable of. Instead, she suggests that this literature is written as much for future generations as for contemporaries:
It is expensive to buy books. However, let us agree to buy this book together, for perhaps, by bravely keeping in our hearts the consciousness of the terrible things that have happened, then we can in some small degree hope to alleviate the pain of grief. Maybe thoughts perhaps might reach their mark. And if they cannot, still one day it will be good for the survivors to know that the world that could not help nevertheless suffered with them.51
Thus, literature can act as a kind of memory, as a way to preventing all the lives lost from drowning in the sea of oblivion. And if the books cannot be proven to have made life grievable, to have reduced the distance between people, it can at least be shown, be it here in this chapter or in the enduring testimonies, that they can serve to reduce the gap in time between what was then and what is now.
Notes
1 Translations are mine if not otherwise indicated. ‘Snart var Verden eet gabende Saar, | De To blev Tusinder. Dag blev Aar. | Men du glemmer dem aldrig – de første To, | som bares i Land ved Galata Bro.’ From the poem ‘The First Wounded’, Inga Nalbandiàn, Dønninger (Copenhagen: Aschehoug & Co., 1919), 23.
2 Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? (2009; London: Verso, 2010), 21.
3 Butler 2010, 79.
4 Ibid. 63–4.
5 Ibid. 13.
6 The following is largely based on Kristian Gerner & Klas-Göran Karlsson, Folkmordens historia. Perspektiv på det moderna samhällets skuggsida (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005).
7 The international research on the Armenian Genocide is extensive. A selection: Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide. Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995); Tancer Akcam, A Shameful Act. The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Richard Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986); Richard Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide. History, Politics, Ethics (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1992).
8 Gerner & Karlsson 2005, 128.
9 For a discussion of the Armenian Genocide as the archetypal genocide, see Gerner & Karlsson 2005, 134–5.
10 Gerner & Karlsson 2005, 137; Erik Lindberg, ‘Svensk armenienpolitik’, in Göran Gunner & Erik Lindberg (eds.), Längtan till Ararat. En bok om armenisk identitet (Religionshistoriska studier, 1; Gothenburg: Gothia, 1985), 273.
11 Alma Johansson, Ett folk i landsflykt. Ett år ur armeniernas historia (Kvinnliga missionsarbetare, 1; Stockholm, 1930); Armeniskt flyktingliv (Kvinnliga missionsarbetare, 2; Stockholm, 1931); Maria Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary. Harpoot 1907–1919 (London: Gomidas Institute, 2001); Amalia Lange, Ett blad ur Armeniens historia. Danska K.M.A. 1910–1920 (Stockholm: Kvinnliga missions arbetare, 1920); see also Maria Småberg, ‘Witnessing the Unbearable. Alma Johansson and the Massacres of the Armenians 1915’, in Karin Aggestam & Annika Björkdahl (eds.), War and Peace in Transition. Changing Roles of External Actors (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2009).
12 Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘When the Cannons Talk, the Diplomats Must be Silent. A Danish Diplomat during the Armenian Genocide’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 1/2 (2006), 197–224; see also Bjørnlund, ‘“Et folk myrdes”. Det Armenske folkemord i Danske kilder’, MA diss. (Copenhagen University, 2005).
13 Vahagn Avedian, ‘The Armenian Genocide 1915. From a Neutral Small State’s Perspective: Sweden, MA thesis, Department of History, Uppsala University, 2008, 39, available at <http://www.armenica.org/material/master_thesis_vahagn_avedian.pdf>.
14 Lindberg 1985, 268. For Scandinavian commitment in Armenia, see also Helle Schøler Kjær, 1915: Danske vidner til Det Armenske Folkemord. Maria Jacobsen, Karen Jeppe, Carl Ellis Wandel (Copenhagen: Vandkusten, 2010); Göran Gunner, Folkmordet på armenier – sett med svenska ögon (Skellefteå: Artos, 2012); Svante Lundgren, I svärdets tid. Det osmanska folkmordet på kristna minoriteter (Otalampi: Sahlgren), 2010.
15 Marika Stiernstedt, Armeniernas fruktansvärda läge (Stockholm: Svenska Andelsförlaget, 1917); see also Sofi Qvarnström, Motståndets berättelser. Elin Wägner, Anna Lenah Elgström, Marika Stiernstedt och första världskriget (Skrifter utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Uppsala universitet, 58; Hedemora/Möklinta: Gidlund, 2009), 267–8, 324–5.
16 Britt Sturve, Reidar Sunnerstam & Ebon Sönnergren, ‘Armenienfrågan i svensk press under första världskriget’, in Gunner & Lindberg 1985.
17 Chaïm Perelman & Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhétorique. Traité de l’argumentation (Paris: PUF, 1958).
18 Qvarnström 2009, 353.
19 Butler 2010, 10.
20 Ibid. 12.
21 Ibid. 1.
22 Inga Nalbandiàn, In i natten. Bilder från Armeniens undergång (Stockholm: Hjalmar Lundberg & Gösta Olzon, 1917), 71 & 73. All quotations are my translations from the Swedish translations.
23 Inga Nalbandiàn, Bakom förlåten (Stockholm: Svenska förlaget, 1918), 153, ‘Det gnistrar för ögonen på honom av matthet. Det gör ont i bajonettsåret i skuldran. Sova – sova!’
24 Nalbandiàn 1918, 160, ‘Stepan … Kom och hjälp mig att bära ut dem.’
25 Inga Nalbandiàn, Det vita fältet (Lund: Gleerups, 1919).
26 Nalbandiàn 1917, 77, ‘de äro borta allesammans, vännerna och arbetskamraterna, politikerna, medlemmarne af nationalförsamlingen, redaktörerna, professorerna, alla ‘de intellektuella’: så godt som alla ha deporterats eller hängts eller i bästa fall skjutits inne i Mindre Asiens mörka ödemarker; patriarkatet är stängdt, tidningarna indragna –’.
27 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; 2nd edn., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).
28 Peter Englund, ‘The Bedazzled Gaze: On Perspective and Paradoxes in Witness Literature’, in Horace Engdahl (ed.), Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium (River Edge, NJ: World Scientific, 2002), 52.
29 Ibid. 51.
30 Stiernstedt 1917, 36 & 35, ‘Flickorna blevo (på vägen) så gott som utan undantag våldförda av soldaterna eller deras hantlangare’; ‘lämnats i händerna på tio officerare, till deras förnöjelse – “to be their sport”’.
31 Nalbandiàn 1917, 50, ‘Och så blefvo alla kvinnorna samlade i oxvagnar och körda till båtar, som lågo nere på floden. Och de skreko och gräto. Men de unga och de, som turkarne tyckte om, de fördes för sig själfva. Och de såldes allesammans och många af barnen såldes också. Och de barn, som fått sin mor såld till andra, de sprungo omkring och gräto –’
32 See Butler 2010, ch. 2, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag’.
33 Ibid. 50.
34 Ibid. 51.
35 Nalbandiàn 1917, foreword, ‘Jag måste se med andras ögon och känna med andras hjärtan för att kunna skildra de tilldragelser, som äro det förskräckligaste och det otroligaste af allt obotligt, som världskriget vållat. De tilldragelser, som satt dödens outplånliga spår i mitt eget och mina små barns lif.’
36 Inga Nalbandiàn, ‘Aabent Brev til Skandinaviens Kvinder!’, reprinted in Berlingske Tidende, 1 February 1919, ‘Og om det er vor egen, lille Humajàk – den eller den af de vildfarne, hjemløse, halvnøgne Børn, der i Sporene af Deportationernes Dødstog nu og da opsamles af barmhjertige Rejsende, søgende efter Bygkorn i Hestenes og Muldyrenes Ekskrementer … – jag véd det ikke, og det spiller ingen Rolle.’
37 Nalbandiàn, ‘Aabent Brev’, 1919, ‘Og lad nu i den 11t Time skandinaviske Kvindeforeninger hjælpe hinanden til, at Lyset igen kan tændes dybt inde i de mørke Barneøjne’.
38 Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen (DKB), Gyldendal B4a, letter from Inga Nalbandiàn to Peter Nansen, 22 September 1914.
39 DKB, Gyldendal B4a, Vilhelm Østergaard to Inga Nalbandiàn, 15 September 1914, a letter held in Peter Nansen’s collection of letters.
40 Inga Nalbandiàn, Balkan-noveller. Tyrkiske typer (Copenhagen: Aschehoug & Co., 1918).
41 H. Aschehoug & Co.s Forlag 1872–1922. Jubilæumskatalog, (Kristiania: Aschehoug & Co., 1922). The focus of their publication was scientific literature, particularly language and cultural history, and fiction, both Danish and translations.
42 DKB, NKS 4043, 4, Inga Nalbandiàn to Peter Nansen, 24 February 1917.
43 Georg Brandes, ‘Armenierne. Kronik’, Politiken, 15 May 1917.
44 Quotation from the back of Nalbandiàn’s second book in the series, De Hjemsøgte 1917, ‘Den ser Virkeligheden under Øjne, skildrer gribende, uden at lægge hverken Følsomhed eller Indignation for Dagen, Forholdene som de var og er.’
45 ‘Et Dameportræt hver Uge’, Berlingske Tidende, 22 April 1917.
46 Anna Lindhagen, ‘Armeniernas undergång. En dansk-armeniskas berättelser’, Svenska Dagbladet, 24 December 1917. Lindhagen was a leading member of the Swedish section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which published a call to aid the Armenian people in the Christian newspaper Svenska Morgonbladet in February 1919. Lindhagen was also in contact with the Turkish diplomat in Stockholm, Galib Kemali Bey, concerning a planned protest meeting organized by the Norwegian and Swedish Women’s Association; however, the protest seems not to have taken place (Stockholm City Archive, Anna Lindhagens arkiv, Anna Lindhagen to Galib Kemali Bey (n.d.) and Galib Kemali Bey to Anna Lindhagen, 22 May 1922.
47 Anna Lindhagen, ‘Litteratur’, Morgonbris, 1917, 11.
48 ‘In i natten’, Dagens Nyheter, 10 December 1917.
49 Lt–s, ‘In i natten. Ett nödrop från Armenien’, Stockholms Dagblad, 21 October 1917.
50 Vilhelm Buhre, ‘Litteratur’, Lunds Dagblad, 26 October 1917.
51 Lindhagen 1917, 11, ‘Det är dyrt att köpa böcker. Men kom dock överens att köpa denna bok tillsammans, ty kanske ändå genom att modigt hålla medvetandet av det förfärliga som skett vaket i våra hjärtan, så kunna vi hoppas att i någon liten mån mildra sorgens sveda. Måhända kunna kanske tankar gå fram. Och om ej de kunna det, skall det dock för de överlevande en gång bliva gott att veta att den värld, som icke kunde hjälpa, dock led med dem.’